March 8, 1970 did not go entirely as planned. About a hundred invaders confronted military police in riot gear while five hundred supporters protested legally outside the gates. Some of the invaders reached the base chapel, where a Sunday service was underway, but the MPs formed skirmish lines and contained the action. Violence broke out when some invaders responded to what Whitebear described as "overly aggressive handling by the MPs." The military police, aided by regular Army troops and Seattle Police, placed the invaders in the fort stockade before ejecting them. The activists established a tipi encampment outside the fort. Jane Fonda, in Seattle to support parallel protests at Fort Lewis linking Native rights to opposition to the Vietnam War, lent her celebrity to the cause. The occupation had failed as a physical takeover. As a political statement, it was just beginning.

Whitebear organized the movement under the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, blending political negotiation with continued direct action and public pressure. The city, under Mayor Wes Uhlman, initially refused to negotiate, directing the group to the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- an agency that excluded urban Indians from its services and that urban Indians deeply distrusted. Whitebear built alliances across tribal and governmental lines. Joe DeLaCruz, leader of the Quinault, conducted outreach to every tribe in Washington State. U.S. Senators Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson amended the Land and Water Conservation Act to reduce the cost of acquiring surplus federal property. The BIA imposed a temporary freeze on Fort Lawton transfers. Eventually, the city granted $600,000 to the American Indian Women's Service League for social services, and a one-million-dollar state grant funded design and construction of the cultural center itself.

Whitebear's brother, sculptor Lawney Reyes, joined with Arai Jackson Architects to design the facility. The result, completed in 1977, is a work of modern architecture that incorporates elements of traditional Northwest Native building -- massive timbers, soaring spaces that echo the proportions of a longhouse, and an orientation toward the water and landscape that gives the building a ceremonial presence. Inside, the permanent art collection anchors the space. Reyes's Blue Jay, a sculpture 30 feet wide and 12 feet high, hung for more than three decades in the Bank of California building in downtown Seattle before being donated to Daybreak Star when the bank merged with Union Bank in 1996. A major oil painting by Guy Anderson, based on a traditional Northwest Native representation of a whale, arrived with the same donation. Today the center functions as a conference space, a location for pow wows, a Head Start school, and an art gallery serving about 25,000 Native Americans from various tribes who live in the Seattle area.

Bernie Whitebear died of cancer in 2000. His final dream was a complex of three additional buildings called the People's Lodge, approved in 2004 but postponed indefinitely in 2006 for lack of funds, even after the tribes, the city, and neighborhood residents had agreed on a reduced scope. What endures is the building he did live to see, standing on 20 acres of Discovery Park -- land that the Army once controlled and that the government once said it didn't need. Outside the center, the Bernie Whitebear Memorial Ethnobotanical Garden grows the plants that Northwest Native peoples have used for centuries. It is a quiet place, which is appropriate. The loudest act in Daybreak Star's history was the occupation that made it possible. Everything since has been the patient, daily work of sustaining a culture in the heart of a city that nearly ignored it.